Pantheism, Renaissance

Abstract

The term “pantheism” only emerged at the end of the seventeenth century and was connected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a specific interpretation of Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy. Nevertheless, already in this so-called Pantheismusstreit, Giordano Bruno was labeled the predecessor of modern pantheistic thought. Nicolaus of Cusa, as a follower of Meister Eckhart, also later began to be viewed as a pantheist, as he was suspected of holding a similar heresy as Eckhart and the medieval philosophers Amaury of Bene and David of Dinant. Provided pantheism is defined in the strict sense as the identity of God and nature, as the etymology of the word indicates (pan, all; theos, God), it would seem that this “crude” pantheism was unfamiliar to Renaissance philosophers. Both Nicolaus of Cusa and Giordano Bruno advocated in a certain sense the immanence of the divine in the world but also simultaneously viewed a difference between God and nature and ascribed transcendence or at least transcendental aspects to God.